Eva Maria Vecchi, Marco Baroni and Roberto Zamparelli.
Presented at the workshop “Distributional Semantics and Compositionality” (2011) PDF
The authors attempt to use distributional models to distinguish between acceptable and “semantically deviant” adjective-noun combinations (an example of this distinction is given by “blue rose” vs “residential steak”). They hypothesise in particular that the length of the vector representation of the adjective-noun combination is an indication of its acceptability. Their reasoning for this hypothesis assumes that directions and in particular axes are interpretable in distributional models (this does not apply in the case of word2vec, at least). They further hypothesise that the combination will be spatially isolated with respect to the cosine similarity.
The distributional representation is derived from a POS-tagged and lemmatised corpus by considering sentence-internal co-occurrence between the vocabulary as a whole and the 10k most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives, transformed via the “local mutual information” measure and reduced to rank 300 using PCA.
Different methods of transforming the noun representation using the adjective to obtain the adjective-noun combination are studied and the results are evaluated against human judgements of semantic deviance.